Lewis Hamilton’s utter domination here of his Mercedes team-mate, Nico Rosberg, could almost be described as bullying as he prepared for the Italian Grand Prix with his 56th pole. It was also his fifth pole position at Monza, which pulled him level with the record holders Juan Manuel Fangio and Ayrton Senna, and his third in a row here.
A helpless looking Rosberg was reduced to head-shaking amazement. “The problem was Lewis had his best qualifying for a long time,” he said.
In their first run in Q3 Hamilton was faster by three-tenths of a second. And in his last run he extended his advantage to almost half a second. He leads the world championship by nine points and is looking for his 50th career win on Sunday. He said: “I feel incredibly proud to be up amongst Senna and Juan Manuel. They were incredible drivers and I never thought in a million years my name would be mentioned in the same sentence as theirs, so I am very proud of that. I came with my A-game today, and particularly that last lap felt incredible.
“I am obviously very happy. I was only made aware of that record as I came into this weekend. That was in the back of my mind but I was hoping that it wouldn’t steer me off course.”
In the morning, Hamilton had shown outstanding form as he dominated the final practice session. He finished 0.393 seconds faster than Rosberg, with Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel almost a second behind in third place. It proved well beyond his rivals. And he carried that form into the qualifying session in which Rosberg was unable to get close to him.
Meanwhile, Ferrari have announced that they are concentrating on next year after yet another desperately disappointing season. “I think we failed the targets, I don’t think there’s a doubt in my mind,” president Sergio Marchionne said.
“It’s no use putting sweeteners on the stuff, the car isn’t there and I don’t think we developed it. I think we started well in Australia, I think that we failed in developing the car during the season which is due to a variety of reasons.”
Ferrari have failed to win a race this season after their three victories in 2015 had encouraged their supporters to think they could close the gap on Mercedes this season. But Mercedes have won 12 out of 13 races so far with Red Bull winning the other.
In Q1 Jolyon Palmer failed to make the next stage but after a difficult season he will have taken some confidence from the fact that he out-qualified his Renault team-mate Kevin Magnussen. Also fallers at the first hurdle were Daniil Kvyat (Toro Rosso), Marcus Ericsson (Sauber), Esteban Ocon (Manor) and Felipe Nasr (Sauber).
In Q2 the casualties were the McLaren pair of Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, Manor’s Pascal Wehrlein – who had done so well to finish between the McLarens in Q1 – Carlos Sainz (Toro Rosso), Romain Grosjean (Haas) and Felipe Massa (Williams).
